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  Ibn Battutah also described the exchange of slaves among the potentates: “The King of China has sent to the Sultan [of India] a hundred Mamluks and slave girls, five hundred pieces of velvet cloth…. [The sultan] requited the present with an even richer one…a hundred male slaves, a hundred Hindu singing and dancing girls.”11

  Trade delegations between Egypt and China had been commonplace not only centuries before Zheng He’s voyages but also centuries before Ibn Battutah’s. They were led by the Karim, a formation of Egyptian Jewish merchants who specialized in trade between Cairo, India, and China.12 A certain Bazaldeen Kulami Karimi,13 born in 1149, went to China five times, amassing a great fortune from the Chinese ceramic and silk trade. Thirteenth-century chronicler Zhao Ruqua mentions a wealthy Tazi merchant sojourner who financed an Arab cemetery in the southeast quarter of the Chinese port of Quanzhou, so that Arab merchants could be buried facing Mecca.14

  Chinese merchants imported huge quantities of Arabic frankincense. Song records indicate that Chen Xin Lang, a merchant, imported frankincense valued at 300,000 guan. Karimi merchants in China lived in luxurious houses and were big spenders, the envy of all in the trading port. In consequence, the emperor instructed local officials to watch for “untoward unruly behaviour.”

  Trade between Calicut and the Egyptian Mamluks flourished in the 1420s. Historian Stanley Lane Poole tells us that in 1425, a captain convoyed fourteen vessels with rich cargoes to Jeddah. The following year, no fewer than forty ships sailed from India to Cairo and Persia, paying duties to the value of seventy thousand dinars.15

  Reciprocal visits were not restricted to merchants. The kingdom of Mecca sent a delegation to pay tribute to China after Zheng He’s visit in 1414; the sultan himself appeared in person with tributes of a lion and a quilin (giraffe) to be presented to Zhu Di. In 1433 the sultan sent a delegation led by Shu Xian to accompany the Chinese delegates returning to China.16

  Liu Gang, owner of the 1418 map, points out a very interesting pattern in several Chinese records, including the Captivating Views of the Ocean’s Shores; Notes on the Barbarians in the Western Oceans; Records on Tributes from Western Oceans; and the Ming Shi-lu itself.17 Each of the four books provides a description of Hormuz that cannot possibly correspond to the Hormuz we know today. They describe vegetation that blossoms in spring, leaves that fall in autumn, and winter with frost, little rain, and much dew. The books also state that Hormuz is one of the biggest kingdoms in the western oceans, and that businessmen from barbarian countries arrive by sea or road. Hormuz, they add, is close to the seashore at the end of the Western Sea. People are white-skinned and tall. Society is highly developed in literature, medical knowledge, astronomy, art, and technique—far superior to other barbarians. Indeed, they compare the level of civilization there to that of Zonghua (China).

  None of this is applicable to Hormuz, which we know from many fifteenth-century merchants’ accounts as a small island in the Strait of Hormuz, between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, with little vegetation and no frost, a tiny, inaccessible place so intolerably hot it was inhabited only three months a year. Civilization, including astronomy and medical techniques, was hardly developed at all.

  In my view, the “Hormuz” described by the Chinese books of the fifteenth century can only mean Cairo. This is substantiated by the Ming Shi Waigua Zhuan (Profiles of foreign countries in Ming history) compiled by You Ton of the Qing dynasty.18 It states that Mosili (Cairo) was called upon by Chinese envoys, including Zheng He, but that it failed to reciprocate. Descriptions of Chinese trade with Cairo proliferate. The Chinese scholar Li Anshan, in Feiizhou Hualiko Huarem (A history of Chinese overseas in Africa) identifies the Mosili kingdom as Egypt and the Jiegantou Kingdom as the port of Alexandria. Mosili was again denoted as Egypt in the pioneering research of Zhang Xing Gang and Han Zhenghua. They also identified Jiegentou as Alexandria, a Chinese transliteration of the Arabic name Zuilkarnain, which was used by the Arabs to refer to Alexander the Great. In Chinese Religions and National Minorities, the Chinese historian Bai Shouyi writes, “Mi Xi en [contemporary Egypt] had all regularly sent their merchants and envoys to China and China sometimes would send its envoys or merchants to these countries.”

  The Ming Shi-lu says, “Year 6 [1408] Zheng He went to Hormuz and other countries returning home in Year 8 [1410].” Further corroboration that Zheng He’s fleets visited Cairo is found in maps. The 1418 map has this description: “There is a huge city here built with stone, the dimensions of stones can be compared to those used in tombs of the Qin dynasty Emperor.” The volume of Emperor Qin’s pyramid tomb and the volume of the Pharaoh Khufu’s pyramid at Giza are about the same—Qin’s has a larger base area, while Khufu’s is higher. The Map of Southwest Maritime Countries, from Zheng He’s era, also describes the Egyptian Pyramids.

  So Egypt was not a new frontier to Zheng He: his forebears had been traveling there for centuries. They had reached Cairo through the shallow Red Sea–Nile canal, which Zheng He’s smaller junks would have used as well. From Cairo, the Mediterranean—and southern Europe—were well within reach.

  6

  CAIRO AND THE RED SEA–NILE CANAL

  The best place to understand the importance of the River Nile to Cairo and Egypt is from the Windows on the World on the 36th floor of the Ramses Hilton. Every time I visit Cairo, I make a point of quaffing lager there surrounded by swifts and swallows twittering at sunset. To the west, highlighted by the setting sun, are the plateau and the Pyramids. The Moqattam Hills are to the east. North and south, the great river storms out of Africa, traveling in a great curve past the Hilton to the green smudge of the delta up north.

  Between the Pyramids and the Moqattam Hills rests the large, wide valley over which modern Cairo sprawls. This valley was once more than eight hundred feet below the sea and some thirty to forty miles across. The enormous river gradually dried up thousands of years ago and became heavily forested and rich in game—elephants, hippopotamus, antelope, and all manner of deer and birds. The river, then as now, teemed with fish. Beautiful sunshine for most of the year coupled with the endless flow of water made life easy for hunters.1 This is why Egypt has one of the oldest civilizations in the world, comparable to that of China along the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers or Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates.

  Over the centuries the silt brought down through Africa by the mighty river has gradually been deposited on the eastern and western banks of what is now modern Cairo. As the river narrowed, the ports have moved steadily north.

  The first Europeans here were Greeks, who built a city at Heliopolis, about four miles south of the Ramses Hilton on the east bank of the Nile. The Romans built Babylon, north of Heliopolis; the Arabs built Al-Fustat/Misr (Cairo) still farther north, and in the late Middle Ages the port moved north of where the Hilton stands now—first to Maks and then to Bulaq, which is now opposite Cairo’s main railway station. As the ports migrated, so did the entrance to the Red Sea–Nile canal from the river. By the 1420s, the entrance was below what is now the Hilton. Looking to the northeast from the Windows on the World, one can still see its outline. When it was filled in 1899, the walls on either side were left, allowing it to retain water. Today the tramway passes right over this forgotten canal—a green pencil line stretching from the Hilton to the railway station.2 One can travel beside the canal today from Cairo to Zagazig, as Marcella and I did in 2006; it remains about one hundred feet wide the entire way.

  To see how the river has gradually narrowed, you can take a felucca up the Nile, sailing with a gentle breeze against the current, which in autumn is about half a knot. The old Roman fortress of Babylon is still visible, with a very old Coptic church on top of it. A little group of Coptic churches and a synagogue surround the remains of the Roman city. Here the Egyptian authorities, have erected a sign stating: this was the entrance to the red sea nile canal.

  A mass of information exists about the evolution of the canal from the time of the Pharaoh Necho I
I (610–595 B.C.). Herodotus tells us (Histories) that four steles were erected by Darius (522–486 B.C.) to commemorate the canal’s construction. Berkeley professor Carol A. Redmount in “The Wadi Tumilat and the Canal of the Pharaohs” writes that the steles were placed on elevations so they could be seen by boats on the canal. The westernmost stele was discovered at Tell el-Maskhuta; the others were found along the canal, ending about six kilometers north of Suez. One face of each stele features hieroglyphs, the other cuneiform (in Persian, Elemite, and Babylonian characters).3

  Professor Redmount tells us that Herodotus, who visited Egypt in the mid-fifth century B.C., was the first classical author to mention explicitly the canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea. He said the canal was started by Necho II and completed by Darius. Aristotle, writing in the fourth century B.C., cites Sesostris as the canal’s creator. Ptolomy II, Philadelphus (reigned 285–246 B.C.), records the cutting of the canal through the Wadi Tumilat. He is followed by Diodorus Siculus, who, on a visit to Egypt in 59 B.C., confirmed that the waterway was begun by Necho, continued by Darius, and finally completed by Ptolemy II, who provided a lock to compensate for the rise and fall of the Nile. According to Strabo (64 B.C.–A.D. 24), the canal was 46 meters wide and of sufficient depth to accommodate large ships. In his Natural History, Pliny states that the canal was 100 feet wide and 40 feet deep for a distance of 371/2 Roman miles up to the Bitter Springs. The Alexandrian astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus, or Ptolemy, called the canal “the River of Trajan” and indicated that it started from the main Nile stream upriver from Babylon—that is, from Heliopolis. Lucien, an Egyptian official under the Antonine emperors, in about A.D. 170 described a traveler who sailed the canal from Alexandria to Clysma on the Gulf of Suez:

  Then came the Arabs.

  [The] Caliph Muiz had invested a fortune of his own to conquer Egypt, so he obviously wanted to get back his investment as quickly as possible, and as always the Red Sea Canal was to be implement of his wealth. The customs port of Al Maks, which means “customs tax,” lay in the bend of the river which came almost up to the walls of Kahira on the west side near the canal, and this Mu’iz immediately took over and expanded into a proper dockyard, keeping its tax collecting character but also laying the foundations there for a new port of his own, which immediately took away much of the business that usually went to Fustat-Misr.

  Here Mu’iz built six hundred ships and about 77 years later, when Nasir Ibn Khusrau came to Cairo [in the 11th century], seven of his ships were still lying on the river bank. “I, the author of this narrative, Ibn Khusrau says: ‘I have seen them’”. They measured thirty erich by sixty arech (275 feet long by 110 feet abeam). These ships were no doubt a brilliant investment because they could move large quantities of cargo at one time, rather like the modern monstrous oil tankers. Nothing that could make money escaped Mu’iz, and he reorganised the whole tax system into a central collecting body which did away with the local collectors, who used to take a considerable rake-off of their own. In one day he collected over 475,000 US dollars (modern equivalent) in taxes from Fustat-Misr alone.4

  In A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages, Stanley Lane Poole tells us, One hundred and twenty thousand labourers were kept at work winter and summer in maintaining and improving dams and canals. The old canal traditionally called the Amnis Trajanus connecting Babylon (Cairo) with the Red Sea was cleaned and reopened in less than a year and corn was sent to Medina by ship instead of by caravan as in the previous year.5

  In short, a wealth of evidence from Greek, Roman, and Arab writers states that the canal enabled ships to carry goods from the Nile to the Red Sea and vice versa. Grain was transported from the wheat fields of the Sudan to Rome, Mecca, Arabia, and India. Chinese porcelain and silk could be brought to Rome, Venetian glass to India.

  In 642, Amir ibn Al-As dredged out the old canal, which was filling with silt brought down by the Nile. A century later there was a rebellion in Mecca and Medina, and in 767 the Abbasid Abu Ja’far al-Mansur blocked the canal to stop corn supplies from reaching Mecca. Shortly afterward, in 780, during the caliphate of Al Mahdi the canal was reopened. Then in 870 Ahmad ibn Tulun dredged the canal once again, and a further expansion took place in 955.

  The next huge improvement to the canal was caxrried out by Sultan al-Malik an-Nasir in 1337, who assigned no fewer than 100,000 men to the job. He also built the Nilometer on the south of Roda island, which can be seen to this day. It measured the height of the river and thus served as a flood warning.

  This final canal widening and dredging is summarized by historian James Aldridge in Cairo: Biography of a City, based on descriptions by the fifteenth-century Egyptian historian al-Madkrizi:

  The land which emerged round Elephant Island was marshy and soft and Makrizi, who tells us all this, says the Mamluks used to practise archery there. But in the middle of the fourteenth century Al Nazir joined the Red Sea canal to the new bank of the river through this new swampy land, thus draining it. This new exit for the old canal was called Khalig Al Nasir, and it remained the exit of the Red Sea canal until this century, although it was later diverted again and called the Ismailiya Canal. It met the river where the Egyptian Pharaonic Museum is now, near the Nile Hilton. This final version of Nazir’s canal was only filled in at the end of the nineteenth century to make what is now Rameses II Street, and anyone with a moment to spare on top of the Nile Hilton can look down on this street and trace the line of the old canal right up to the station square which was once the port of Al Maks.6

  As we have noted, one of the Chinese names for Cairo was Misr, a name derived from the pharaonic name for the river port in Babylon. As time passed, Al-Fustat and Misr became interchangeable names for the port and the city of Cairo, “no doubt because all trade with Egypt was directed eventually to the river port of Misr or it came from Misr,” Aldrich explains. “So it seems logical that sooner or later it was all known as Fustat-Misr (which is what al-Makrizi often calls it) and then simply as Misr. Today, Egyptians still call both their country and Cairo simply Misr.”

  On November 26, 2004, the Oriental Ceramic Society of France held a conference in Paris on trade between China and the Mediterranean prior to the sixteenth century. The conference produced a wealth of fascinating detail about the export of Chinese ceramics to Egypt, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean.7

  Excavation sites in the southern suburbs of Cairo have produced Chinese ceramics dating from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries. In “Chinese Porcelain from Fustat,” archaeologist R. L. Hobson describes the significance of the porcelain and ceramics finds:

  …Turning over the piles of fragments stored at Fustat and in the Arab Museum in Cairo…we realise most clearly the extent and antiquity of the trade between Egypt and the Far East. There are, for instance, pieces of buff stoneware with cream glaze mottled with green and brownish yellow, which came from China in the Tang dynasty; there are several varieties of celadon porcelain which tell of Sung traders. And there are blue and white porcelains ranging from the Yuan to the end of the Ming period….

  The typical Lung ch’uan and ch’u-chou celadons of the Sung, Yuan and Ming periods abound, bowls and dishes with carved designs or with reliefs of fishes or rosettes, things too well known to call for detailed notice….

  It was only natural that the volume of trade with China should increase in the Ming dynasty…. This is evidenced in Egypt by the large quantity of blue and white porcelain, of which fragments abound not only at Fustat, but all around Cairo.

  …Among the earliest specimens is the bottom of a bowl with the reign-mark of Yung Lo (1403–1424)”—viz Zhu Di.8

  This extraordinary trade in porcelain and ceramics was lubricated by the Karim. The Karim had their own warehouses ( fonduqs) stretching from Cairo to India and beyond. They built their own ships and sometimes leased them to others. They also operated as bankers, which proved to be their undoing.

  In 1398 the Karim made a massive loan to the Mamluk sultan, to fina
nce an army to halt Tamburlaine’s march toward Cairo. When the loans were called, the sultan came up short. Al-Ashraf Barsbay nationalized the Nile–Red Sea canal to replenish his coffers, setting the prices at which goods brought through Egypt could be bought and sold. With a single stroke, the security for the Karim’s loans—trade through the canal—unraveled. The Karim were ruined within decades. When China withdrew from the world stage in the 1430s, after Zheng He’s final voyage, Chinese goods came no more.

  Cairo: The Quintessential Timeless Islamic City

  Cairo stands today just as it did in 1433. The fortified city has withstood invaders for five centuries. During the Mongol wars, Saladin’s fortifications provided a refuge for all of Islam, making Cairo a haven not only for the caliph but for philosophers, artists, craftsmen, and teachers as well as hundreds of thousands of ordinary people fleeing Genghis Khan and his successors. Enormous wealth flowed into the city and was deployed on a sumptuous array of mosques, madrassahs, mausoleums, and hospitals. This is the domed medieval Cairo that Zheng He would have found.9